InfoWorld's Galen Gruman highlights 18 technologies that remain core to the computing experience for IT, engineers, and developers 25 to 50 years since their inception. From Cobol, to the IBM mainframe, to C, to x86, these high-tech senior citizens not only keep kicking but provide the foundations for many vital systems that keep IT humming.

Actually, I've heard that large institutions like the CERN have a problem with Fortran.

Today, there is not much of a performance benefit in using Fortran instead of C any more. The reason why these institutions still have to use it, despite people willing to program stuff in such an ugly language being increasingly hard to find, is that they have a huge library of Fortran code around. A rewrite of that would take decades already, and will take more in the future.